 This Many Miles from Desire
(WordTech Communications, 2007)
by Lee Herrick
88 pages/$17.00
The haunting music of Lee Herrick's This Many Miles from Desire reflects the quest of the poet, an adoptee, to understand his place in the world: "one more child found in the world's history/of found children." Spiritually yearning, imagistically sharp, and lyrical, Herrick's poems are a journey of reward.
"Lived poetry of the living world, where the ocean is Buddha and grandmothers surface between what is and what might be. Lee is a poet of exceptional control and breathtaking grace, who is unafraid to go for the leaps of word and heart. This new poet will keep poetry alive. I've been waiting for this book."--Lorna Dee Cervantes
"Lee's poems bend towards light, towards a higher grace beyond words. Here is a collection of wise, heartfelt, honest poems that feel like songs, sad songs you play alone at midnight to remind your soul to live. Yes. Live. It will be one of my new travel bibles to take on the road, to comfort me when I get weary, to remind me that what we are doing is priceless and soulful and necessary as prayer. Bless you, Lee, for this beautiful music."--Ishle Yi Park, author of The Temperature of This Water
"Lee Herrick's poems celebrate the ability to make a life in the awkward space between worlds, where we find ourselves 'not quite the rose/but not quite the roots.' In settings as diverse as Korea, Latin America and Fresno, California, the poems speak of the emotional experience of being adopted, of one man's search for identity, of the problem of abandonment--but most of all, they speak of the constancy of love. There is no blame or bitterness here at all. These are songs of grace and acceptance and joy, and they invite us to open our arms and embrace the complexities of our own unstable worlds. This is a poet with enormous talent and a large and generous heart."--Corrinne Clegg Hales
About the Author
Lee Herrick was born in Seoul, South Korea and adopted at ten months. He is the author of This Many Miles from Desire (WordTech Editions, 2007). His poems have been published in the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Many Mountains Moving, The Bloomsbury Review, MiPOesias, and others, including anthologies such as Seeds from a Silent Tree: Writings by Korean Adoptees, Hurricane Blues: Poems About Katrina and Rita, and the new edition of Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California's Great Central Valley, forthcoming from Heyday Books in Fall 2007. His essays have been published in Korean Quarterly and Visions Across the Americas, and he is co-authoring a composition textbook called Outside In: Writing to and From the Center, forthcoming from Prentice Hall. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a 2000 Los Angeles Poetry Festival Award finalist.
He has traveled throughout Latin America and Asia, backpacking through El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Peru, Bolivia, Cambodia, Thailand, South Korea, China, Viet Nam, and Laos.
He received his Master's Degree in Composition and Rhetoric from California State University, Stanislaus and served on the Board of Directors of the English Council of California Two-Year Colleges for six years, and he is the founding editor of the literary magazine, In the Grove. He teaches at Fresno City College and lives in Fresno, California with his wife and daughter. His website is http://www.leeherrick.com/
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